@rainbow71113 wrote:
I don't think ad blockers would remove these types of ads. I don't mind ads for Hudson Bay, Visa etc because they don't affect my sales but ones that specifically offer reduced prices for the same items I am selling is counter-productive. Ebay gets final value fees when we sell something so why are they shooting themselves in the foot by making it impossible for us to sell anything. I guess we all have to make our own websites and then contract with ebay to get exposure resulting in sales on them. That's the only way we're going to make any money at this rate.
You can block any page element you want really if you don't want to see it. You can run an adblocker in conjunction with something like ublock origin and selectively remove everything. I use a combination of that for my main work browser but keep another one without just so I can compare from time to time to see what's changed.
As for why they are doing it? Simple ,they need to drive their GMV upwards every quarter. User growth is essentially negative once you remove all of the fudging eBay's execs have been using to game the numbers. The only way the can appease shareholders is to turn to monetizing sources other than buyers. That means moving forward they will be looking at more ways to extract money from sellers and more ways to decrease marketing spend while increasing advertising revenue, whether taken from the seller or an external party. Every business works in cycles, eventually you peak, max out your total addressable market for sales and have to switch towards making more profit from your existing level or declining level of actual sales. Think of it like when a new company takes over an old one, they look at where they can pinch pennies to cut costs and where they can charge more.
With the reality of where ebay is today, it should not be seen as the sole venue for your business. It's a channel, and it can be a very important one, but that is all it is. You should look at ebay as one of your larger important customers rather than your entire customer base. If you objectively analyze a given seller looking at their number of listings versus their actual sales you can see a great many sellers are failing to turn their inventory within 120 days let alone 90, 60, or 30. Businesses go broke that way.
The vast majority of marketing/ad spend goes to google and facebook to drive traffic to brand/retailers websites. That is where retailers are finding positive ROI as it is highly targeted/tuned to the customer, but if your sole sales channel is ebay, the high cost of doing business here means you can't throw around marketing dollars to drive traffic whether you adverting externally or from within ebay. Between "trending rates" from promoted listings, fees, etc you are effectively at a 20-25% cost. That doesn't work as a business unless you are in an exceptionally high margin category and even then those tend to be categories with very high levels of return and buyer fraud. There are low cost ways of driving traffic to your listings via communities or blogs that can help, but how much that can help depends on the nature of what you sell.
If you look at how ebay is evolving, in order to succeed as a seller what you sell will be less important than how low you are willing to sell it for and how geographically close you are to larger markets. The best match algorithm is going to be heavily weighted towards driving customers to a "good" seller with the lowest price that can get the item the quickest to a customer for the lowest total cost. For those that sell less mainstream items we get stuck in a quagmire where feature wise there is very little on the platform moving forward that is being designed to increase the discoverability of our items by buyers. Switching everything to GTC is one of the few things that will actually help in this regard since it will keep pages indexed by search engines for longer.
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